Orkut product manager cites issues related to frequent updating of open source software as a factor in spotty service

Google's Orkut social networking site has been beset with bugs lately, leading the company to apologize for spotty service.

Orkut is an online community intended to make participants' social life more active and stimulating. The Orkut engineering team is working to address recent issues with the site, said Eduardo Thuler, Orkut product manager at Google, in a blog post on Friday. He cited issues related to the frequent updating of open source software as a factor.

"First, Orkut is based on open source software that is subject to frequent updates, which we then pull and merge into the Orkut code tree. A result is that this can sometimes makes bugs harder to discover and fix. We accidentally began overwriting user app preferences, which resulted in the activity updates not getting posted, but this has now been fixed," Thuler said.

"The Orkut engineering team has been hard at work addressing some recent issues and we would like to provide a status update and apologize for the inconvenience our spotty service may have caused you," he said.

Google also has had to deal with getting viewer and owner information via data pipelining, a process that broke. The company was working to fix this as of Friday, according to Thuler.